Department of Sociology and Institute for Advanced Computational Science
Stony Brook, NY 11794
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Biography
My current work combines statistical, network, and computational methods with large-scale datasets to study social, political, and organizational behavior. Particularly, I am using large-scale GPS data, administrative records (e.g., FEC records, voter files, and consumer profiles), and social media data (e.g., billions of tweets, millions of YouTube videos) to study mobility, segregation, and polarization among different settings in the U.S. and worldwide.
Research
My current work focuses primarily on understanding mobility, segregation, and polarization in the U.S. I am using big data from FEC with corp data to track the polarization/partisanship trend in the US corporate leadership. I am using large-scale GPS data and near-population level voter and consumer records to assess the antecedents and consequences of racial/partisan/income/cultural segregation in both residential and activity spaces. This human mobility, segregation, and polarization project has been funded by an OVPR seed grant at Stony Brook University. I am also using deep learning methods to detect and monitor anti-AAPI hate speech and incidents as well as associated mental health issues (a direct result of polarization and xenophobia) from Twitter since the COVID-19 outbreak. This project has been funded by a seed grant from IACS at Stony Brook University. Some of these ongoing studies have appeared in top journals such as Demography, RSF: Journal of Social Sciences, the Sociological Quarterly, Chinese Sociological Review, Socius, Scientific Reports, and Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Recently, I am very interested in the following two big questions: How will AI shape the future of our society and how will our society shape the future of AI? To address these questions, I am starting to expand my research into new areas (Yes, I like new challenges), including the responsible usage of AI in addressing climate and health issues. Specifically, I am keen on exploring a significant question: How can we leverage the rapid advancements in AI to confront critical challenges such as conflict and violence and climate change to improve community resilience? If you are interested in these questions, feel free to reach out to me. I am seeking any potential collaboration in the near future. Building on large-scale multimodal social media data such as Twitter (now X) and YouTube, we are developing and applying large language and vision models to capture the psychological state of online social media users and further assess how it might shape online and offline behavior. We are also interested in the discourse opportunity structure of enviromental justices across various social media platforms over time and how AIs can help mitigate misinformation on these platforms.